[.net] Unmanaged C++ with VB.NET

Look into P/Invoke.

In VB .NET you use the Declare statement to access unmanaged code.
When the unmanaged code is COM code you should also take a look at the tlbimp.exe tool which creates an interop assembly.

Cheers

Try this document. I know it is in MC++ but it should offer some help, or atleast some keyword from which you can search more info.

http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/cplusplus/articles/mcmigrate.doc

Or just simply go to gotdotnet.com, they have a nice collection of sample code etc...

http://www.gotdotnet.com
Or this one... here you can find lots of articles with source. Maybe theres more help there.
http://www.codeproject.com/

I would give more info about using unmanaged C/C++ code in managed apps(for .NET). I have done it myself, but only in MC++. The rule still is that you can apply same methods in VB .NET, C# or MC++. Thats why I gave you the first link. Read it and use the Visual Studio documentation. Thats how I got started.

Not sure if I understand what you want to do - if the format of the maps is well known, your editor could just output it, you don't actually need to go around interoping between languages. You just need to make sure that both write/read the same binary format from the map files...

If that's all you want to do, check the file IO functionality on the framework, and maybe the Runtime.InteropServices.StructLayoutAttribute attribute.

That said, it might be easier to create a C++ library, expose a managed C++ interface on top of it and reference it from VB .Net, as sugested above.

Thanks for the help, that should be all I need!